Technical Field
The present application generally relates to heath information, data and images and more specifically to the capturing, processing, and submission of this information, data, and images from a mobile device.
Prior Art
Protected Health Information is defined by the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Interpretations of what PHI might include can be found on Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_health_information as accessed Mar. 28, 2013; HIPAA.com, http://www.hipaa.com/2009/09/hipaa-protected-health-information-what-does-phi-include/ as accessed on Mar. 28, 2013; and from many other 3rd party information sources.
The US government generally requires that systems accessing electronic health records need to be configured to grant access to PHI only to people who need to know it. If PHI is accessed by a person not authorized to access it, then this could indicate a violation of both the HIPAA Privacy and Security Rules. Under certain circumstances, such an incident may have to be reported to the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and/or a state agency as a breach of unsecured protected health information. Having good access controls and knowledge of who has viewed or used information (i.e., access logs) can help to prevent or detect these data breaches.